The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamespassive loss of appetite for all life’s values; and second, it shows howthe altered and estranged aspect which the world assumed in consequenceof this stimulated Tolstoy’s intellect to a gnawing, carkingquestioning and effort for philosophic relief. I mean to quote Tolstoyat some length; but before doing so, I will make a general remark oneach of these two points.First on our spiritual judgments and the sense of value in general.It is notorious that facts are compatible with opposite emotionalcomments, since the same fact will inspire entirely different feelingsin different persons, and at different times in the same person; andthere is no rationally deducible connection between any outer factand the sentiments it may happen to provoke. These have their sourcein another sphere of existence altogether, in the animal and spiritualregion of the subject’s being. Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenlystripped of all the emotion with which your world now inspires you,and try to imagine it as it exists, purely by itself, without your favorableor unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almostimpossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity anddeadness. No one portion of the universe would then have importancebeyond another; and the whole collection of its things and seriesof its events would be without significance, character, expression,or perspective. Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our respectiveworlds may appear endued with are thus pure gifts of the spectator’smind. The passion of love is the most familiar and extreme exampleof this fact. If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process ofreasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature lovedas utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-likegray to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole world to a new tunefor the lover and gives a new issue to his life. So with fear, with indignation,jealousy, ambition, worship. If they are there, life changes.And whether they shall be there or not depends almost always uponnon-logical, often on organic conditions. And as the excited interestwhich these passions put into the world is our gift to the world, justso are the passions themselves gifts—gifts to us, from sources sometimeslow and sometimes high; but almost always nonlogical and beyondour control. How can the moribund old man reason back tohimself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with139